GENERATIONS; Without Raising a Voice, a Choir Soars

By NEIL GENZLINGER

Published: September 3, 2006

IN 20 years as a parent, I've been to my share of kiddie concerts, plays, art shows, recitals, speech contests and such. Some have been surprisingly entertaining. A few have even threatened to raise goosebumps. But the most moving of them all was a choral concert in which the pitch was wildly erratic, the rhythm was embarrassingly inconsistent and the choir members sang not a single syllable.

My younger daughter, Abby, was a central part of this happy fiasco, which took place last year at Regional Day School in Hamilton, N.J. She delivered the title line in a rendition of ''It's a Small World After All,'' and for the Mickey Mouse Club theme song she had the pivotal assignment of contributing the ''M-O-U-S-E.'' That might not impress you, but it certainly was a revelation to me, since Abby, who was 8 at the time, is unable to speak.

The performance that day was by the Regional Day Augmentative Choir, a dozen students with severe disabilities, all of them nonverbal and impaired so that communication systems like sign language aren't an option. The disabilities range from the familiar, like cerebral palsy, to the obscure, like Rett syndrome, which is Abby's. For these children, performing a concert meant hitting a switch on a communication device so that a computer-generated voice or the recorded squawk of a favorite teacher would deliver the assigned lyric at the right moment.

This was a long, long way from what we were used to in our household, where theater and the other arts have always played a big role. Abby's mother once taught and directed theater; I often review it. Abby's older sister, now in college, has over the years been in piano recitals, band concerts and lots and lots of plays. In short, we had had plenty of exposure to the traditional performer/audience equation: students apply their skills to create artwork of some kind that has entertainment value for those observing it. The Regional Day Augmentative Choir concert, though, was an entirely different animal. It was an entirely different definition of art.

The concert, which featured only the two aforementioned songs, unfolded in slow motion, as do most things in the world of the disabled. The performers were spread out in a line, each with his or her communication device, some of them computerized keypads attached to wheelchairs; others, like Abby's, simple recorders activated by hitting colorful buttons.

One of the teachers took a microphone and, scrunching down on a ''scooter board'' usually used by students for physical therapy, rolled from choir member to choir member as the songs progressed, holding the mike up to the performers. That, for the record, is dedication. It would have been easy enough to walk the microphone down the line, but this teacher didn't want to get in the students' spotlight.

The spotlight, of course, doesn't fall on children (or adults) with disabilities very often. It's easier than it used to be for them to see art -- theaters have wheelchair access; some shows offer signed performances now and then (though that gesture reaches only a small slice of the disabled world). But chances for them to actually do art, to be applauded like their able-bodied peers, don't come along often.

That's because it's a rare person who sees the need and is willing to accommodate it. Abby has encountered a few in her young life. There's Ray Andersen -- Mr. Ray -- a rock-oriented children's singer based in New Jersey who has a habit of bringing youngsters onstage to sing or clap a rhythm; this summer at a concert in Edison, N.J., he made sure a group of students from Abby's school had the chance. There is Tim Lefens, an artist in Belle Mead, N.J., who developed a program in which students with severe disabilities paint by using head pointers and other devices to direct an able-bodied aide wielding a brush.

There aren't enough such spotlight opportunities, of course -- whereas Abby has had a handful, her older sister, by the time she was Abby's age, had already had a few dozen. That's because this type of artistic effort requires, most of all, an unselfishness by the audience. It requires the willingness to abandon the expectation of being entertained, at least in any traditional sense.

The Mickey Mouse Club song that day, for instance, featured gaps as long as 40 seconds between the lines as the students with limited muscle control struggled to persuade their hands to hit the right switch. ''Mickey Mouse. . .'' Moderate pause. ''Mickey Mouse. . .'' Interminable pause. ''Forever let us hold our banner high!'' Hardly the stuff of a cast album. The expressions on the choir members' faces, though, were something to see.

This was a performance done for the performers' sake -- normally, a recipe for audience irritation, but here, triumphant for everyone in the room.

A few of those East Village performance-art types could learn something from this. I've seen plenty of shows -- self-absorbed monologues, indecipherable installations -- that, like the Augmentative Choir concert, were being staged primarily for the performer. Generally ticket holders leave such shows not amused or inspired, but annoyed. ''I paid good money for that?''

Why were the ticket holders -- well, all right, it was free -- downright exhilarated after the Augmentative Choir show? It helped, of course, that most in the audience were family members and friends of the performers. (Who else would sit through that ''Small World'' song, no matter how it was rendered?) But here's another important difference: when performance artists have a self-indulgent streak they tend to exude a contempt for the audience. ''Get it if you can,'' they seem to say, ''or get out; I could care less.''

There was no contempt coming from the Augmentative Choir, of course, only honesty. ''We're trying something that's profoundly difficult for us,'' the choir members might have said if they could speak. ''If we succeed, we'll be really pleased with ourselves. That's our show; nothing more, nothing less.''

But there was something more. The inner world of these children must be chaotic indeed: neurons that don't fire properly, muscles that don't move when ordered. Why was their little show so inspiring?